Talk Beginner

How exactly can we teach students the right FOSS etiquette?

Approved

Session Description

Every online tutorial and blog on “how to contribute to OSS” or “how to make your first PR”
teaches the mechanics and commands, but almost none teach the etiquette: when it's okay to ping a maintainer, how to take a rejected proposal gracefully, why a half-finished AI-generated PR adds to stress and overload for the maintainers. Now that open source sits on the student resume(s) right next to internships and projects, this missing gap of education has real consequences: maintainers across GSoC, LFX and Hacktoberfest have publicly described waves of low-effort and spam contributions, with many OSS projects shutting down for new contributions.

This talk is about the cultural layer underneath a pipeline: the norms that decide whether a student community produces thoughtful contributors or AI spammers. A pipeline tells you how to get more students contributing; it says nothing about whether those contributions are any good for the projects on the receiving end.

At Point Blank, an OSS community we have been running for the last 7 years, we've spent the last few years turning that culture into something teachable, and we’ll walk through what actually worked:

A peer proposal-review gate : our "war rooms" so that of the ~40 GSoC proposals our members write in a season, none reach a maintainer as unreviewed slop. Every draft is torn apart by people who've been selected before it goes anywhere near an org.
A "contribute before you apply" norm, anchored by a Hacktoberfest kickoff and weekly sync-ups, so contribution is a sustained relationship with a project rather than a March résumé sprint.
An explicit etiquette curriculum covering what contributing.md leaves out: how to ask for help in public without spamming, how to treat a maintainer's time as the scarcest resource in the project, and how to behave when your contributions are rejected.
A mentor-handoff model: every contributor who gets selected comes back to coach the next batch, so etiquette is transmitted by example, not preached from a slide.

We will be honest about what didn't work, and about the awkward cases, including what we do with the member who openly just wants the T-shirt. We will close with a short, concrete checklist that maintainers and student-club organizers can adopt to keep their contribution spaces both welcoming to newcomers and resistant to spam.

Key Takeaways

A repeatable way to teach contribution etiquette, not just mechanics and why that distinction matters more in a hyper-competitive student culture.

A concrete proposal-review process that cuts low-effort and spam submissions at the source, including the trade-offs of running it at scale.
How to coach contributors through rejection so they stay civil and keep contributing.
A short checklist maintainers can use to set norms that invite newcomers without inviting spam.

References

https://www.pointblank.club/oss

Session Categories

Community

Contributing to FOSS

Which track are you applying for?

Main track

Speakers

Akash Singh Devops | Sabi

I'm Akash Singh, known as SkySingh04 online. I specialize in DevOps, MLOps and Golang.

I currently handle all things related to DevOps and Infra at FinalroundAI, and work as a DevOps and MLOps Engineer at Sabi. I have previously worked as a DevOps Engineer at Aspora and Embeddings Co. where I worked with AWS, Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, and as a Backend Engineer at CloudSek with my work primarily focusing on Golang and microservices. I'm a Kubestronaut, holding all 5 CNCF Kubernetes certifications [CKA, CKAD, CKS, KCNA and KCSA] and a big believer in all things Kubernetes.

I am active within the Open Source community. I run my own open source community called Point Blank, organize the Cloud and DevOps devroom at IndiaFOSS, and was selected for Google Summer of Code 2024 with Keploy and the Linux Foundation Mentorship 2025 with LitmusChaos.

I was the team leader for Hackglobal Hackathon 2024 which happened in Singapore. I have also participated and won in 7 other hackathons, winning and getting podium finishes all through. I regularly volunteer as a mentor and judge for various hackathons as well. I also attended ACM Winter School 2024.

I have also actively worked as a teacher, trainer and international speaker, both professionally at SwipeGen and CodingZen, and during club meetings as the Team Lead at Point Blank as since I genuinely enjoy talking about tech and sharing my knowledge with peers and juniors alike.

You'll find me with a mic in my hand emceeing on stage or winning Public Speaking Events across India.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/skysingh04/

Ashutosh Pandey SDE 3 | AMD

I was created to create.

I know I love computer science because I've tried out almost everything else. After completing senior year with Biology (and ranking 4th all India in boards), I spent two years building UAV's in one of India's best Aero Design teams. During this time, I did marketing, electronics and picked up a little designing on the way. Our team won 3 medals in SAE Aero West 2018 and 2019. Then I went on to participate and win the Hardware edition of the biggest Hackathon of its kind in the world, the Smart India Hackathon 2019.

I was one of the 10 individuals in the world and the only Indian selected by Element14 to run a BBC Micro: Bit summer code club. Won the grand prize for establishing the best code club in DSIS, Bengaluru. Then I worked as a Google Summer of Code Participant with Arduino, my project involved creating a Transpiler which can translate a subset of C/C++ code into MicroPython.

Subsequently, I went on to work for Code Coverage Metrics for GLibC under ELISA (Enabling Linux In Safety Applications) project, as a Linux Foundation mentee. I solved a crucial bug in GLibC that prevented code coverage from working, and submitted a patch and presented my work at Elisa workshop #6. I also Interned at Free Software Foundation where I worked on Free Software activism, moderated LibrePlanet sessions and worked on researching free eBook readers.

Currently I am working with the AOCC compiler team at AMD Bangalore, India. I work on Pragmas, Internal tooling, DevOps (for Compilers), validations, feature development and bug fixing. I also Co-organize the LLVM Bangalore meetup on weekends, which is the largest compiler community in the world.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashupdsce/